The article investigates questions about both British and Turkish memoir-writing and memory on a period as contested and central in the formation of national identity as the Turkish War of Independence, based on a close study of a brief interview between Atatürk and a British Control Officer in Anatolia, Walter Harold Miles, recalled in the latter's unpublished memoirs and which has gone without mention in the extensive and detailed literature on Atatürk's early movements after his arrival in Samsun in May 1919.